The Gender and Sexuality Collection is a valuable resource for university librarians, researchers, and teaching staff. This collection delves into themes such as domesticity, education, work, sexuality, representation, religion, mental health, activism and motherhood. By surveying gender identity and sexuality from diverse perspectives, it raises critical questions about gender roles, feminist theory and heteronormativity. Covering a broad historical range from the medieval period to the present day, this collection is indispensable for those engaged in gender and sexuality studies.
| Key series |
| Gender in History |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 7 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 2004-2022 titles | 89 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Domesticity |
| Education |
| Work |
| Nature |
| Sexuality |
| Heteronormativity |
| Representation |
| Religion |
| Global South |
| Mental health |
| Motherhood |
| Gender roles |
| Activism |
| Feminism |
| Beauty |
| Thema subject categories |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History |
| Economics |
| Politics and government |
| The Arts |
| Feminism and feminist theory |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Gender studies, gender groups |
| History of religion |
| LGBTQ+ Studies / topics |
SDG coverage
Gender and sexuality collection
For a majority of the French population during the period known as the Renaissance, most medical care would come at the hands of women. Women's medical work, like that of other providers, needs to be situated in specific historical and social contexts. This book adopts a number of methodological approaches which will help to highlight and understand women's medical practices, and may provide new ways to perceive their contribution to the history of medicine more generally. It focuses on women because, as practitioners, they cut across most sectors of medical practice. The book is structured in such a way as to demonstrate how different contexts and communities responded to women's medical work in varied and sometimes contrasting ways. It explores religious understandings of female healing work as lay and religious women. The book presents the study of women's domestic and charitable medical labour, by exploring the impact of print in the context of women as readers and patrons of medical literature, with a focus on the publication of manuals contributing to the domestic care discourse. It examines the role of women in the municipally organised systems of poor relief and child care for foundlings and orphans. The book also follows women's gynaecological and reproductive knowledge, particularly in the contexts of elite and royal court life.
This chapter examines how women employment to care for poor or foundling children by municipal charity organisations affected the status, employment and authority of child carers at the royal court. Women numbered among the practitioners providing medical services to the royal family. Louis XI had employed such women in his medical retinue, though usually in the least glamorous of role. Like all royal employees, female child-care providers relied on favour from their royal patrons, and consideration needs to be given to this motivation in understanding their activities. Despite the increasing interest in and publication of child-care texts by both the medical and wider community, the women chosen to oversee the health and wellbeing of the royal children were not selected for any medical expertise recognised by the universities as such. Governesses were chosen for their family connections and because they were mothers, and wetnurses selected for their own physical health.
The chapter surveys the main themes of the case studies in the volume, stressing how much these otherwise diverse nations have in common in their approach to elder care. In all cases it has never taken priority in policy-making compared with other welfare issues. Discrimination and stereotyping of older people have been pervasive. Everywhere female family members have taken the main responsibility for care, with little public support. The pressure upon them has grown, often stressfully, as care services, public and private, have declined further with the spread of neoliberalism and the still greater impact of the COVID pandemic. This has generally made the inadequacies of care more public but there is little sign that it is leading to improvement anywhere.
Like other Mediterranean countries, Portugal is characterised by a strongly familistic care regime, where women continue to play a central role in family care. Recently, Portugal has attempted to implement the Informal Carer Statute, a policy to support family carers. This chapter aims to chronologically reconstruct the evolution of the carers’ policy in Portugal and identify controversies around this social policy. Based on a documental and historical analysis, 15 regulations were identified between 2016 and 2022, focusing on the benefits for informal carers, cash benefits, and state co-payment of services. Eligibility criteria, based exclusively on income, limit the access of thousands of carers who are silenced by the state. The new care regulation has exclusively become a measure to combat situations of poverty. Recognition of the carer's contribution and protection in retirement and ill-health have been minimised, although these constituted one of the main demands that pushed for the emergence of a carers' movement in the public arena. The struggle for recognition through the social movement for informal carers (O movimento dos cuidadores informais) turned into a struggle to change the law, mobilising civil society. The National Association of Informal Carers, as the representative body of its members, emerged from the social movement and, recently, was the promoter of a citizens' legislative initiative. Through the Portuguese case, different examples of strategies of a process of politicisation are portrayed. Care becomes thus an object of political struggle within the social and political field.
This chapter looks at the evolution of Herminie and Fanny Pereire's relation to religious practice and the manner in which they defined their identity, a journey in which acculturation and embourgeoisement led them both, albeit differently, to an accommodation, of being both French and Jewish. That journey was infused with elements, historical, social, cultural, and economic, as well as religious. Burial in consecrated ground according to Judaic rites had been essential to the spiritual comfort of the Sephardic residents of Paris - indeed, of Jews of any town or village in France. Finally, it is arguable that the anti-Jewish invective heaped on Fanny's husband by the Catholic Church in 1863 and again in 1869 induced a reaction and a closer reconciliation with Judaism; that is, in her later life she wore proudly and publicly being Jewish as a defence against the antisemitism that had been heaped on the Pereire family.
This chapter introduces the topic of care for older people as inherently political and gendered and the related politicising and gendering processes in Europe. First, it presents the epistemological and academic motivations underpinning the need to elaborate a multidisciplinary collective volume on a topic that has not been tackled and developed previously. One of the most important reasons informing this choice is that both politicising and gendering care for older people are two transversal processes that share the same reference to some inherent and pervasive features of care, namely care as political and gendered by definition. Second, the chapter introduces a conceptual background indispensable to establishing a clearly defined focus of all contributions to the book. Neither exhaustive nor providing a deductive approach or theoretical framework shared by all chapters, this conceptual background concerning politicising and gendering care for older people in Europe serves as a reference tool guiding different country-based and multi-level analyses. Its primary role is to introduce one clearly outlined exploration interest while opening up diverse research questions and multidisciplinary studies. Third, the introductory chapter presents the book’s structure and the topics, questions, and research directions addressed by each contribution to the volume. These multidisciplinary investigations depend primarily on the specific and relevant aspects concerning politicising and gendering care for older people and how these occur in different European settings and at societal and political levels.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the care of older adults in Serbia. Under the guise of care for ‘grandpas and grandmas’, the government enforced policies, measures, and protocols that severely impacted the already fragile system for the care of older adults in Serbia, at the same time creating a situation in which those older persons who were previously independent turned completely dependent, while those who were truly in need of care were unable to get it. On the other hand, the underpaid, undervalued caregivers – the main subjects of this chapter – bore the greatest brunt of the pandemic-induced politicisation of care for older adults in Serbia. Prior to the pandemic, care of older adults was already a gendered issue, as women were the primary providers of both informal and formal care. The pandemic has exacerbated this gender imbalance. In addition, the pandemic has shed light on the shortage of skilled caregivers and the precarious position of paid care in the informal economy. The shortage of caregivers has made it even more difficult for women to balance their paid and unpaid work, and it has also led to a decline in the quality of care for older adults.
This chapter considers the nature of the marital relationships entered into by the second generation and the ways in which Herminie and Fanny were to accommodate the business interests of the Pereire brothers in fashioning the requirements for suitable spouses. It takes note of the role they played in arranging suitable liaisons, including the negotiation of religious affiliation. The chapter also notes how the marriages that took place subtly altered the family situation in its religious and social outlook and in its dynamic. The Pereire family's relationship with Judaism was relatively fixed by the 1840s when the first of the second generation was ready to marry. They identified as Jewish, they had not abjured the religion of their birth, they still supported Jewish causes and institutions, they still mixed within Jewish circles, and, perhaps most importantly, they were seen by others outside the family as Jewish.
This chapter reviews the book’s central arguments before offering some closing thoughts on their historiographical implications. It argues for the importance of gender and sexuality to political histories of the English Revolution and calls for a reconsideration of Restoration sexual culture; it positions mid-century sexual politics in alternative chronologies, such as that of European civility and the broader history of sex-talk; and it briefly suggests how its narrative might alter prevailing narratives about the history of Western sexuality. The chapter concludes by urging for a closer relationship between the history of politics and the history of sex.
This book proposes that Herminie (1805-74) and Fanny Pereire (1825-1910) played essential but often unremarked roles in the lives and the ultimately spectacular businesses of their husbands, respectively, Emile and Isaac Pereire. For Herminie and Fanny not only provided a family life that was at once supportive, calm, stable, and united, and contributed substantially to the public face their husbands enjoyed and that enabled the Pereire businesses to flourish - as was expected of women of their class - they played an often-unacknowledged role in those businesses. Kinship was the bedrock of the Pereires' business success. Elite Jewish women also played a role during the Great War similar to the one they had played during the Franco-Prussian War. The fate of Jews in France thereafter and during the Second World War is a tragedy known only too well, however.